What the January 6 Report Actually Says
The January 6 Report includes details about the ordinary people hurt by the lies that led to the January 6 riot.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol was the first time that the United States’ peaceful transfer of power was interrupted. Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud led to a violent mob who descended on the Capitol when Congress sat to confirm Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
After the attack on the Capitol, Congress reconvened to certify the election results. The House of Representatives created a committee to investigate:
What led up to the attack
How the attack unfolded
Which organizations knowingly spread false claims about fraud
The January 6 Report is the written investigation that the House Select Committee produced. For a congressional report, it’s surprisingly readable. It reads like a commercial political thriller.
It also contains information that either hasn’t been widely reported or is easy to forget. For example, after Trump’s team falsely accused Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of fraud, a group of his supporters stormed Moss’ grandmother’s house looking for the pair.
The details of the violence of January 6 are similarly arresting.
It Was Not a Peaceful Tour
At 2:41 p.m., police officers were crammed into the West Plaza tunnel with a mob of angry Trump supporters. The tunnel saw one of the worst acts of violence against an officer that day:
“Albuquerque Head, a rioter from Tennessee, grabbed Officer Fanone around the neck and pulled him into the mob. ‘I got one!’ Head shouted. Lucas Denney, the Three Percenter [militia member], ‘swung his arm and fist’ at Officer Fanone, grabbed him, and pulled him down the stairs. Daniel Rodriguez then tased him in the neck. Kyle Young lunged towards Officer Fanone, restraining the officer’s wrist. While Young held him, still another rioter, Thomas Sibick, reached towards him and forcibly removed his police badge and radio. Officer Fanone feared they were after his gun. Members of the crowd yelled: ‘Kill him!,’ ‘Get his gun!’ and ‘Kill him with his own gun!’”
The FBI estimates about 140 police officers were injured in the fighting on January 6. Members of the mob brought pepper spray, tasers, and other weapons to use to break into the Capitol. Some police officers were beaten with Blue Lives Matter flags.
That’s before getting to the militia members in the crowd armed with guns.
Militias Coordinated to Begin the Attack
In the days leading up to January 6, the D.C. Homeland Security office noticed a troubling pattern:
“…these groups, these nonaligned groups were aligning. And so all the red flags went up at that point…when you have armed militia…collaborating with White supremacy groups, collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online all toward a common goal, you start seeing what we call…a blended ideology, and that’s a very, very bad sign.”
Before the mob marched from the Ellipse Hotel to the Capitol, members of the Proud Boys militia removed the barriers blocking the Capitol’s West Plaza from the street. The militia members also pushed through the barriers to bring the crowd through the security barriers and eventually, into the Capitol itself.
Unsurprisingly, the most violent mob members were among the groups roaming the Capitol’s halls. In an interview with the Select Committee, a White House Security Official recalled radio chatter from Vice President Pence’s security detail after the Capitol was breached:
“The members of the VP detail at this tie were starting to fear for their own lives. There were a lot of — there was a lot of yelling, a lot of — I don’t know — a lot [of] very personal calls over the radio. So — it was disturbing. I don’t like talking about it, but there were calls to say good-bye to family members...”
The January 6 mob was not a tour group being helped along by security. It was a dangerous group of people threatening lawmakers’ lives for certifying Biden’s 2020 victory.
Accomplices in Boring Places
Trump wasn’t the only one spreading lies that led to the January 6 riot. For example, Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington over false claims he made about voter fraud in Pennsylvania. (Giuliani claimed there was “massive fraud” in Pennsylvania without offering evidence.)
False claims of election fraud also flowed through the Republican National Convention (RNC). Trump called the RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, to assist in his fake elector scheme, in which an alternate slate of electors from key states would be certified on January 6, throwing Trump the election instead of Biden.
She was also involved in meetings about the language Trump used in his fundraising emails. They included revising “President Trump won this election by a lot” to “President Trump got 71 MILLION LEGAL votes.” Another revision changed “Joe Biden should not wrongfully claim the office of the President” to “Joe Biden does not get to decide when this election ends. Only LEGAL ballots must be counted and verified.”
The Report makes it clear that RNC leadership was as culpable for spreading lies about election fraud as Trump:
“In the end, multiple senior RNC staffers approved fundraising emails raising questions about the election results even though they did not know fo any evidence about fraud impacting the winner of the 2020 PResidential election. For example, Cassie Docksey stated that she was not aware of any fraud that impacted the results of the Presidential election. Ahrens conceded that ‘there was not evidence that we [the RNC] had seen that he [President Trump] won the election, that Biden had not won the election.’”
McDaniel was also in meetings where the RNC negotiated acceptable election denial language to please Trump and ensure the RNC sent emails it was comfortable with.
The machinery of Trump’s election lies, attempt to steal the 2020 election, and refusal to call the National Guard during the attack on the Capitol is worth revisiting. We came dangerously close to sliding from a democracy to an autocracy, where the law is exercised by the whim of a leader instead of the rules of an impartial legal system that applies to both the powerful and the powerless. We almost lost the ability to choose — and hate — our own leaders.
We must not forget what we almost lost.